Mallory has challenged the book several different times: “In three different hearings, the School Media Committee for Magill Elementary decided not to remove the books from the media center. Appellant appealed these decisions to the system level where, in two different hearings, the Media Committee decisions were upheld. Appellant then filed an appeal to the Local Board” ( Laura Mallory vs. Gwinnett County Board of Education ). Eventually, she filed an appeal to the State Board of Education.
Works Cited
Laura Mallory vs. Gwinnett Board of Education. State of Georgia. 20 Apr. 2006. 2006-84 – GADOE Georgia Department of Education . Georgia Department of Education. n.d. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. < http://archives.gadoe.org/_documents/doe/legalservices.pdf >.
“Mother Loses Bid to Ban Harry Potter Books.” Msnbc.com . Associated Press, 14 Dec. 2006. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. < http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16204853 >.
Titus, Ron. ”Banned Book Week.”
Marshall University Libraries
. Marshall University, 17 Aug.
2010. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. <
http://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/books
>.
Sentences as simple as “They made themselves laugh” show how actions that are spontaneous and relaxing—through the use of “made”—become anything but (O’Brien 14). Furthermore, O’Brien sometimes chooses to utilize or omit punctuation when writing the spoken words of a character. He does so to “enhance the unconventionality of his writing” while creating a wholly unique style of penmanship, innovating writing itself, not just his genre (Evans 208).
Works Cited
Brown, Jeffrey. “ Looking Back at the Vietnam War with Author, Veteran Tim O’Brien”. PBS Newshour , 28 April 2010, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics-jan-june10-obrien_04-28 . Accessed 6 November 2016.
Calloway, Catherine. “’How to tell a true war story’: Metafiction in The Things They Carried ”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , Vol. 36, Iss. 4, June 1995, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00111619.1995.9935256 . Accessed 6 November 2016.
Chattarji, Subarno. “Imagining Vietnam: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried ”. University of Delhi, http://www.lasalle.edu/ConnellyLibrary/speccoll/Text . Accessed 6 November 2016.
Evans, Robert C. “Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried : Initial Reception and Detailed Analysis”. Critical Insights: Tim O’Brien, Grey House Publishing Inc., 2015, pp. 202-218, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/lrc/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=592b2904-f3ed-4e35-937d-7a98550c8995%40sessionmgr4008&vid=0&hid=4109 . Accessed 6 November 2016.
Hassebrock, Frank. “Memory and Narrative: Reading The Things They Carried for Psyche and Persona”. Across the Disciplines , Contributor Brenda Boyle, Vol.6, Colorado State University, April 3, 2009, http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/hassebrock_boyle2009.cfm . Accessed 6 November 2016.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried . First Mariner Books. 2009
My first essay (9th grade) is an essay discussing banned books. My second essay (12th grade) is the classic lit research essay. I chose these two as they most severely illustrated the change, over time, in the type of sources I use and how I use them within the essay.
The sources for the 9th grade essay are (in order): the lawsuit filed, a news article about the case, and a timeline of the court case. Only one of these sources has an author, and all three are repetitive, focusing on the same aspect of the case. While credibly, none of these sources are scholarly either. This is in stark contrast to the sources for the 12th grade essay, each of which discusses a different facet of how great a book The Things They Carried is, includes all author names, and all but two sources-one of those being the book itself-are scholarly papers. Furthermore, while all the sources of the 9th grade essay are online sources, two of the sources in the 12th grade essay–Critical Insights and the book itself–have been published. Thus, I have greatly improved my ability to find a variety of credible and scholarly sources in my essays.
However, my usage of those resources has improved greatly as well. In the paragraph from the 9th grade essay, virtually all of it is a quote, which my only words in the paragraph being “Mallory has challenged the book several different times:…Eventually, she filed an appeal to the State Board of Education.” Furthermore, the quote itself is awkwardly attached to the end of a colon. The 12th grade essay does it much better, by including much more analysis and actually integrating the quote by shaping the sentence around the quote so they both fit.
I have greatly grown in my ability to gather and harness resources to make a point, so that they have a much more powerful and persuasive effect in the essays I write.